June 9 was our 2 year anniversary of living in Singapore, now we're moving back to Canada!
If you're surprised, so are we. It was a sudden decision. Guess, it's time to cross a new bridge.
How sudden? Well in May...
- We had Jonathan's company renew our Employment/Dependent passes, which gave us permission to live and work in Singapore for another 3 years.
- We told the tenants renting our Canada house, yes, they can keep renting and get chickens.
- We signed a lease for another year. Seriously, we still haven't even started our new lease, and we've already broken the new lease. We have to pay 2 months rent and some Agent fees to do so.
- We had appointments to convert our Canadian Driver's Licences over to Singapore ones.
- We probably still have book deliveries on order to our house. Hope they arrive in time.
- We had a large pedicure package paid for at the Salon. They hard sell you on pre-paid packages here in Singapore to ensure repeat business. You pre-pay and get an assured discount. In a place where you wear sandals every day of the year, pedicures are frequent, and the pre-paid packages are expected to last a long time.
May 12, 2021 I posted on this blog that we were staying in Singapore. I guess I kind of tempted fate by putting that out there. Just 17 days later, we had completely changed course and bought a new house in Canada.
The whole story is even speedier than that!
The first inklings of a change started on May 10, when we found out we couldn't get an Employment Pass by starting a company of the sort we were thinking in Singapore. Rules are tighter than they used to be. This threw a bit of a wrench in our plans, but we still figured another year in Singapore was the right thing to do. Jonathan would just keep his current job. But...the wheels had started turning.
As I often do, I looked at houses for sale in in Victoria. I sent one to Jonathan who immediately vetoed it and did his own wild search and came back with a winery for sale in Cobble Hill.
That was May 17, 2021; something had clicked and we ran off merrily down the rabbit hole. Basically 5 days after our announcement, we were suddenly moving towards leaving Singapore.
Glenterra Vineyards was in exactly the right place, we could "basically" afford it, and it was a crazy enough idea for us to get excited. We spent a few frantic days of trying to figure out how much work a winery was? How profitable it seemed to be? What was the process? How did a vineyard run? How do you make wine? Jonathan drummed up a coworker who runs a winery in California and racked their brain.
We called a realtor and my mom and asked them to do remote viewing (via Facetime) to walk us through of the property with us. 6 days after "finding" the winery listing, we put in an offer on the place. We hadn't even been able to view inside of the house (just the property and tasting room).
Next they countered, then we countered, and then we waited and waited. Our offer expired and then somebody else came along and paid asking, which we were never going to do.
Sorry, we didn't buy a winery. We probably dodged a bullet there, but also I wish could say we just bought a winery. At this point, we were totally invested in returning to Canada, so we kept looking.
The fact that Singapore had enhanced Covid restrictions didn't make staying in Singapore very attractive at that moment. Singapore felt like less the Covid Safe Haven we'd been thinking it was. Canada wasn't doing too badly with Covid. Jonathan and I were scheduled to get our Covid shots in Singapore. We kept thinking about our kids running around their own backyard in Canada without anyone being able to tell them they couldn't play outside with their own sisters or accompany both their parents. That sounded pretty attractive when Singapore was only allowing groups of 2 outside.
After that we found out just how hot the real estate market was on Vancouver Island. The next 2 properties we asked to see over the next few days were both sold by the time we reached out about them.
The next property were were able to view remotely, we asked out realtor to put in an offer for us before we "left" the property (/ got off the Facetime call). Thankfully we didn't dawdle making up our minds, as it turned out the house already had an offer pending. But our offer was accepted just 4 hours after we submitted it on May 29, 2021.
12 days after we started looking, we had bought a new house in Canada.
Then we had to tell the kids...and our Helper...and our Singapore friends we were moving back home.